It was a perfectly reasonable question, and on the surface it seemed like a perfectly reasonable answer. But when Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd went on Bloomberg TV Friday and mused about the possibility of bank nationalization, panicked investors sent the Dow plummeting a hundred points in the next hour.

Whoops.

Dodd’s casual remark and the not-so-casual consequences it caused were among the most vivid examples of a new Washington phenomenon. The city’s sudden status as the de facto world financial capital means that briefings and interviews that once would have passed with a yawn can create instant terror on Wall Street and Main Street alike.

In the past, the main object of Washington public relations was to try to make news, grab a headline and maneuver for better position in the daily scramble for power and partisan advantage. Usually, no one was much affected beyond the jawboning politicians themselves.

In the current financial crisis, the PR game is serious business.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner laid an egg earlier this month when his public rollout of a bank-rescue plan was deemed too vague by the markets, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average slid a harrowing 382 points.

Last summer, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) faced criticism that his high-profile criticism of IndyMac’s precarious financial condition caused a run on that bank, which failed days later.

Another garrulous politician, Vice President Joe Biden, did not help the cause of consumer confidence when he told lawmakers, in a remark that got out, that there was probably a 30 percent chance the Obama administration would fail.

The root of the problem is a cultural disconnect. Washington and Wall Street simply have not come to terms with how people in one sphere of power tend to talk and how people in the other sphere tend to react.

Matthew Winkler, founder and editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, said that in addition to the capital’s two traditional market movers — monetary (Federal Reserve) policy and fiscal (budget) policy — “today there’s a third driver in Washington, and that’s: What is Congress going to do? What is the Obama administration going to do?”

“Congressmen and senators are not used to being in that situation, but it’s definitely a change we’re going to be living with for a while,” Winkler said. “Any comment by someone in government is taken very seriously.”

In Washington, said former Clinton White House press secretary Jake Siewert, most politicians and their media handlers are accustomed to thinking about how to stand out from the crowd. They have not yet learned the lessons of a succession of Federal Reserve chairmen: On sensitive economic matters, being called “boring” and “inscrutable” can be a compliment.

“You try to come up with something that’s clever and catchy. You may well succeed and you may be sorry,” Siewert said, adding that today’s Washington press secretaries “should be watching CNBC and not CNN.”

“We have started to treat the treasury secretary very much the way we do the Fed chairman,” Liesman said in a phone interview. “We always listened to the treasury secretary on the dollar. But for much of the Bush administration, there was very little that the treasury secretary would say that could really rock the market.”

It was even more unusual for a senator to rock the market, as Dodd did, earning catcalls from critics.

“Sen. Dodd’s ‘nationalization’ comment wins the Oscar for most irresponsible remark by a U.S. official,” said Tony Fratto, a financial spokesman at the White House and the Treasury Department during the Bush years. “The last thing markets need is to have officials speculating about hypothetical policy choices.”

On the other hand, what Dodd said — like what Schumer said last summer — had the advantage of being true.

Speaking on Bloomberg TV’s “Political Capital With Al Hunt,” Dodd said that he “could see how it’s possible” that the U.S. might take over Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp., both of which were rumored candidates for nationalization.

“I’m concerned that we may end up having to do that, at least for a short time,” Dodd said.

The remark went out on Bloomberg terminals, which function as Wall Street’s virtual water cooler, at 12:33 p.m., causing immediate sell-offs of bank stocks.

At least give Dodd credit for a good prediction: Word leaked Sunday night that the U.S. government was in talks with Citigroup to take an ownership stake that The Wall Street Journal said could range from 25 percent to 40 percent.

After Dodd spoke, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs got credit for an upturn in trading after he said during his briefing that “a privately held banking system regulated by the government is what this country should have.”

Aware of how closely he is being watched, Gibbs was back at it on Monday, even though Friday’s message seemed no longer relevant given the weekend’s turn of events.

“Let me — let me read,” Gibbs said. “I felt good about what I said on Friday; the markets seemed to feel good about what I said on Friday — that the president believes that a privately held banking system regulated by the government is the best model.”

In due course, Wall Street may be becoming somewhat more immune to Washington’s daily torrent of words.

James Rickards, a well-known investment banker who now consults on market intelligence, said the “extreme nervousness and volatility” of today’s markets means they “read too much into these things and have an immediate knee-jerk reaction.”

“Often these traders know these comments are meaningless but have to anticipate what other people are going to do,” Rickards said. “It ends up being a momentum trade, based on game theory: I sell bank stocks not because I think Chris Dodd said anything remarkable, but because I think other people will sell. Why do I want to stand in front of a train?”

CNBC’s Erin Burnett said in an e-mail that “the markets are starting to tune the new administration down. Not out ... but they’re turning the volume down.”

“Now there is understanding that the administration is learning and may not yet realize the potency of every word or of how expectations get set,” Burnett added. “So the market listens like hawks, but then pauses before swooping, shall we say.”

Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, who spent years watching his words about the dollar, illustrated the changing stakes.

“The day after the GOP took the Congress in 1994, my old boss, Bill Archer, held a news conference as the incoming ways and means chairman,” Fleischer e-mailed. “He said he wanted to eliminate the income tax and replace it with a consumption tax. The market went down after he said it (who knows if it really was his words that caused the drop), but the press pinned the blame on him in all the next-day stories.”

“The biggest difference between then and now is that then, the government could influence the private sector. Now, the government owns big chunks of it.”